I think we need to face facts regarding Bernie as a candidate [View all]

[forjusticethunders]

I believe Bernie is a superior candidate on policy to Hillary Clinton. I believe his economic platform has a broad appeal to every single working-class American. I think America needs to move to the left and fast (people don't realize how right-wing our political scene until you start looking overseas).

But elections are about winning, and winning is, not just about policy (sadly), but about tone, communication, packaging and messaging. Bernie Sanders is terrible at this stuff. It's his policy and platform that is driving the enthusiasm, not the candidate himself. Run Obama with Bernie's platform and he'd be unstoppable because Obama is a communicator and Bernie is not. I'm not a voter who is really concerned with tone but even I'm having a weekly cringe moment every week from his campaign. He's just not ready for a national campaign, and there's honestly no excuse.

I honestly think he has a bunch of advisors who are from the Reddit crowd who bitch about "identity politics" and "SJWs" and think he doesn't have to specifically talk to demographic groups because his economic message will carry the day (Tad Devine just seems like the kind of guy who's posting on Reddit about how SJWs are oppressing him). And hey, you can think that, I think class is the big driver of everything wrong in American society, but that doesn't mean you don't have to speak to the specific concerns of groups, talk to them in their communities, learn about them. I think stuff like representation is sometimes overblown, but it does matter, and even when Bernie looked strong on these issues, it was always reactive, not proactive. Either way, he's not communicating well, and he's either not tweaking his message or he's flailing while trying to tweak it.

I hope future progressive campaigns learn from this. You can sell a progressive economic platform, but not the way Bernie has done. I still hope he wins, but his severe shortcomings as a candidate have become more and more apparent as the process has gone along.